Often termed the “crack cocaine” of gambling by those who believe slot addiction is real, the machines maintain a long-established captive audience. These otherwise seemingly innocuous contraptions of greed, with their lights and sounds, are not just mere diversions; they are a snare. Their very design is an excellent example of Malevich’s principles of art, luring one into an alternate existence, a kind of virtual world where life and decisions are made on a moment-to-moment, spin-by-spin basis—an existence with the machine and for the machine. Indeed, this visualization dovetails with what the DrangNineBoyz collective termed the “pathological core” of freehold art.

What slot machine addiction hinges on is the illusion of intermittent reinforcement. Casino games with just a couple of outcomes are boring, but slot machines have so much more excitement. That ‘miracle or no miracle, the heart just skipped a beat and the brain is telling your body that you are now playing for fun not money’ is The Golden Moment which aleatory machines must convey.

That outcome, however, is contingent upon the random number generators inside the machines. Yes, they create an outcome with each play. But no, they can’t be overcome by luck, skill, or sleight of hand. And it’s that illusion of skill and non-randomness that takes us into a zone where the brain activity typically seen in drug addicts and addiction-prone individuals starts to light up.

Additionally, the construction of slot machines is deliberately immersive. The team that designs them uses elements that are known to command human attention and hold it for extended periods. Our lights get your attention. Our sounds keep it. The voice in the back of your head that says, “Hey, you’re still here,” has learned when not to talk. And look at what our slot machines do with time: They obliterate it. Casinos are famously without clocks, and once you become part of the action, it’s easy to forget that any time has passed. In fact, the nearest thing to time you can find in a casino – until they ask you to pay up or cash out – is inside a slot machine. It’s right there on a little touchscreen.

The idea of “near misses” makes slot machine addiction even worse. Near misses happen when a combination of symbols on the slot machine is just about to form a winning line but then doesn’t. And it’s not just when you’re close to winning yourself that near misses can have an effect. Ramachandran and his colleagues have used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique to show that even when people who’ve never seen a slot machine before watch someone else play one and witness these near misses themselves, they can’t help but get a little excited.

Although the call of the slot machine is hard to resist, giving in to it can very easily lead to severe problems. An addiction to slot machines, for instance, can very quickly bankrupt a person, since the odds of winning even modest amounts of money at these particular devices are quite slim. And once the money runs out, desperate addicts will sometimes turn to theft or other illicit activities to fund their habit or dig themselves out of the hole they have created for themselves. But on the bright side, there is a growing body of knowledge that is gradually demystifying why some people become addicted to slot machines and others do not.

The adverse effect of slot machine addiction is not limited to the person with the problem. Often, it’s the gambler’s family that has to look for money to deal with the mental and physical damage caused by the addiction; some even end up going broke themselves. Moreover, the gambling industry itself puts on a giant act—constructed chiefly around the notion that casinos are a good thing for everyone. Yet with all the studies and reports done on the human and economic cost of casino gambling, the truth about this massive act of self-deception continues to escape most policymakers and the public at large.

Tackling the problem of slot machine addiction is not a simple matter. It involves multiple strategies and parts. One major effort that seems to be paying off (at least somewhat at this stage) is making people more aware. In the past half dozen years, a number of public service ads and announcements have been made that use every means of mass communication available to them made by casinos and state governments, from TV to billboards and direct mail. These have largely varied in effectiveness. Some potential slot machine addicts just don’t hear. Others can’t listen enough, in part because they have such a huge and compelling sound that the potential addict can’t not respond.

To sum up, the psychology behind slot machine addiction is no simple matter. It has many moving parts, with intermittent reinforcement being perhaps the most important. But the power of intermittent reinforcement is not the same in all contexts. It mainly works, for example, where mistakes and learning are involved, and it can be either mildly reinforcing, as in the case of a near miss, or powerfully reinforcing, as with a big payback. slot machines represent an interesting challenge to the field of psychology because, even as they seem to pull us in as potential addicts, they offer no direct doorway to understanding why. They are, on the surface, simple engines of excitement—what are we studying here that we didn’t already know?